Software OpenGL

Some interfaces, like Plasma-Mobile or simple games require 3D acceleration, even though they are only rendering fancy 2D graphics. With postmarketOS, we have a lot of devices, where 3d acceleration does not work, or does not work with open source drivers. As a workaround, it is possible to do that kind of rendering in software with mesa-swrast. But that is too slow to be usable in most cases. This article lists some alternatives, that will hopefully be more performant.

TinyGLES

TinyGLES was originally written and optimized for the Pandora, which uses the same chipset as the N900. Upstream told us, that it is worth trying at least.

We've tried a bit to get Hildon working, but we did not get very far with it yet.

Current stack:
(hardware) - mesa (swrast) - cogl - clutter - hildon

New stack:
(hardware) - tinygles - glshim - cogl - clutter - hildon

It makes sense to run cogl demos with tinygles before trying anything hildon or clutter related, as Clutter depends on cogl.

More information:

• glshim
• !1051 Packaging glshim for pmOS/alpine
• Asking upstream if this is possible
• Unable to run hildon-desktop: Failed to create texture 2d due to size/format constraints
• Pandora thread about glshim (contains debug environment variables etc!)

OpenSWR

OpenSWR does not work on non-x86 architectures due to its usage of AVX, see [1]

Others

Not much research has gone into these, please expand.

• swiftshader (see pmaports#23), packaging efforts in pmaports!1380